


you are shining brightly and disappearing

by Glassea



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/F, Pre-Relationship, The Spirit World, character death but it's not sad really, no beta we die like men, the ending is (kind of) happy i swear!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 21:46:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17373851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glassea/pseuds/Glassea
Summary: There has never been a great spirit who was human first.(Yue, after.)





	you are shining brightly and disappearing

**Author's Note:**

> I realize that the yue/katara is more implied than anything but this is 100% intended as pre-relationship and not platonic. yue's a lesbian harold
> 
> the title is from Oh My Girl's _Remember Me_.

There has never been a great spirit who was human first.

Even Tui and La, when they chose to enter the mortal realm, were not truly mortal — for they had been spirits first, and some part of them would always be spirit.

The opposite is true for Yue. She was human first, then spirit, and a tiny, core part of her being is undeniably mortal. Human. Yue was human first, and some part of her still is, so it’s —

An adjustment, one might say. But that would be an understatement.

 

* * *

  

Time doesn’t pass quite right. She can’t focus on much, but she can feel the time ebbing and flowing, passing her by at different rates. Yue doesn’t know if this is normal for the Spirit World. She has never experienced it before. Maybe that’s just how time works here. Or maybe time twists away from her because she herself isn’t quite right.

She’s not settled, yet. She became the moon but she is not the moon spirit. She will be, she knows, but she doesn’t know how long it will take, especially now that time slips through her fingers, nonlinear in its winding paths. It reminds Yue of the ice floes, and she aches for home.

Tui is still there, a faint echo, nothing more. He can’t tell her much of anything. It’s nothing new. Yue has had this imprint of Tui in her soul since he blessed her. It’s just that now she knows what that echo really is.

La doesn’t speak, when Yue even sees her. Maybe La doesn’t notice. Yue doesn’t think that’s it.

“Please,” she calls, reaching out — not with her hand, precisely, but with something else — towards the faint light that is La on this side of the Spirit World. “Please, how can I help you?”

The ocean moves on, uncaring.

Perhaps she would be heard in the mortal realm. But Yue doesn’t know how to get there.

 

* * *

 

She settles into the moon spirit slowly. It takes half her concentration and energy to keep Tui — her only mortal manifestation, now — swimming in the Spirit Oasis. She can’t focus fully on fitting herself into the Spirit World.

But finally, after ages of stretching her awareness into the space Tui had been forcibly ripped from, of threading her very being through the paths Tui had carved through both spirit and mortal realms - finally, she is done.

If Yue were still fully human, she would have surely gone mad by now. The sheer connection she has with each realm, and between the realms, is overwhelming. She is moon and spirit in the mortal realms. She is moon and mortal to the spirits.

Yue is not fully human. She does not go mad. But she is still part human. And when time finally moves normally, when she has finally fit herself into Tui’s old spaces, she becomes bored.

It’s true that Yue is patient. She is — was — the chief’s daughter. What was she for, if not sitting attentively at her father’s side as the men discussed fishing and the war and other things not meant for women to understand? Yue knows how to sit still and be patient. She knows how to wait.

But a part of her is only human, and that human part screams its loneliness.

 

* * *

  

It hits her that she’s sixteen.

She was only sixteen when she died. Sixteen years of life as a mortal being, as a human. Spirits have slept for longer than sixteen years and woken up without missing anything.

Sixteen years that felt like everything to her, only for her to realize, now, that sixteen years is nothing.

Yue wants to throw up, but she doesn’t have a stomach. She doesn’t need food.

 

* * *

 

Iroh comes to visit her. Introduces himself properly, too, because the only time they’d met before was when she died.

She loses focus on their conversation at least three times that she remembers. For one of them, when she comes back, the sun is setting. The last time she remembers is about an hour after dawn. Time’s not moving right, she knows.

When she mentions this, Iroh looks at her, not with pity, but with compassion. “You are the moon, Princess Yue.”

“So what,” Yue says, “I don’t need time?”

“Not quite,” Iroh responds. “I rather suspect that time doesn’t want you.”

And he talks about what he knows of the moon, and how it watches, and moves, and cares not for what happens below.

“I know that already,” Yue says, because she does. She has never not been the moon, not for a single second of either life.

“Ah, my apologies,” Iroh tells her, and they sit in silence for either minutes or days or years.

 

* * *

  

She sleeps. She sees the world spin on and watches, but she sleeps.

 

* * *

  

Yue wakes to the Avatar, not Iroh, coming to visit. The Avatar brings another with her, but that’s not too important.

“Yue,” the Avatar says, all Aang even though the face is different.

“Avatar,” Yue says. “You remembered me.”

“I guess I did.” The Avatar shrugs, graceless. "Sort of. I remembered your name when we got closer. Didn’t know you were here, though. Not sure how I know you, either.”

“They forgot me, then,” Yue assumes.

“No!” The Avatar looks sad, suddenly. “No, we didn’t. I grew up on — on stories of you. Princess Yue, who became the moon. I just don’t know how I know you.”

“Aang does,” Yue says. “Who are you?”

“I’m Korra,” the Avatar says. “I came after Aang.”

Yue considers her. The Avatar born a waterbender, like she was. “Come, sit. Your friend too. Let me tell you the story of the Siege that killed me.”

 

* * *

  

When her story ends, the Avatar and her friend sit in silence for a moment. The friend furrows her brow. “You didn’t die, though? You became the moon?”

“No,” Yue says, “I died. I’m not alive anymore. I’m a spirit, but I died.” She pauses. “Please tell them that, when you go back. I’m not a happy ending.”

Yue died at sixteen and has been here, alone save for Iroh’s occasional visits, ever since.

“I’m so sorry,” the Avatar says. “Is there anything I can do?”

“I don’t know,” Yue says, and doesn't cry, because spirits don’t.

 

* * *

  

When the Avatar returns, she brings someone else, someone Yue barely recognizes from her half-attention to the human world.

“Katara,” Yue says.

“You haven’t changed,” Katara tells her, and sits. She looks back at the Avatar. “Thank you, Korra.”

“We’re going to miss you,” the Avatar says, and goes in for a hug. “Bye, Master Katara.”

“Take care of yourself,” Katara says. As she kisses the Avatar on the brow, the years drop away from her until she’s exactly as Yue remembers her — fourteen and brilliant, fourteen and standing up to her father and Master Pakku, fourteen and doing everything Yue never could.

The Avatar leaves, and Yue asks, “Why are you here?”

Katara rocks back and sighs. “I don't really know where else to go. Aang’s never going to die, you know. I’ll never see him again, no matter where I go. Plus, Aang always knew how much I loved waterbending, and you’re kind of the original, you know? I figured — I thought, might as well keep you company, right?”

“Oh,” Yue says, “But your brother —”

“Sokka would get it,” Katara says, and smiles. It’s not a happy smile. It’s full of regret and guilt. “We didn’t come visit you here. We only went to the Spirit Oasis, and it wasn’t really you, and we all could tell. We left you alone.”

“You couldn’t get to me,” Yue says logically.

“We could have found a way.” When Yue goes to speak again, Katara leans forward, laughing, and presses her hand to Yue’s mouth. Yue starts at the touch. “Just let it happen, okay?”

“Okay,” Yue whispers against Katara’s palm. “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

“Tell me about the world?” Yue asks.

“Of course,” Katara says, holding Yue’s hand in hers, and does.


End file.
